<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><?xml-stylesheet type="text/xml" href="fortune-xml-to-html.xsl"?><collection><head/><list><fortuneid="paul-graham-people-who-do-great-work"><meta><title>Paul Graham: People who do Great Work</title></meta><quote><body><p>The people I’ve met who do great work… generally feel
that they’re stupid and lazy, that their brain only
works properly one day out of ten, and that it’s only a
matter of time until they’re found out. </p><p> Paul Graham<br/><ahref="http://xrl.us/ho9c">“Great
Hackers” (later edited out)</a></p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://web.archive.org/web/20040728182546/http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html">“Great Hackers” (old Version)</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-great-men-in-their-youth"><meta><title>Paul Graham about Great Men in their Youth</title></meta><quote><body><p> What they really mean is, don’t get demoralized. Don’t
think that you can’t do what other people can. And I
agree you shouldn’t underestimate your potential.
People who’ve done great things tend to seem as if they
were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate
this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude
biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because,
knowing how the story ends, they can’t help
streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject’s
life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of
some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the
sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with
you, they’d seem impressive, but not totally unlike
your other friends. </p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html">What You’ll Wish You’d Known</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-java-1"><meta><title>Paul Graham about Java - #1</title></meta><quote><body><p> It could be that in Java’s case I’m mistaken. It could
be that a language promoted by one big company to
undermine another, designed by a committee for a
“mainstream” audience, hyped to the skies, and beloved
of the DoD [= “Department of Defense”], happens
nonetheless to be a clean, beautiful, powerful language
that I would love programming in. It could be, but it
seems very unlikely. </p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html">Java’s Cover</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-java-hype"><meta><title>Paul Graham - Java Hype</title></meta><quote><body><p> But for what it’s worth, as a sort of time capsule,
here’s why I don’t like the look of Java: </p><p> 1. It has been so energetically hyped. Real standards
don’t have to be promoted. No one had to promote C, or
Unix, or HTML. A real standard tends to be already
established by the time most people hear about it. On
the hacker radar screen, Perl is as big as Java, or
bigger, just on the strength of its own merits. </p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html">Java’s Cover</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-cs-mathematics"><meta><title>Paul Graham - about Computer Science Mathematicians</title></meta><quote><body><p> Bundling all these different types of work together in
one department may be convenient administratively, but
it’s confusing intellectually. That’s the other reason
I don’t like the name “computer science.” Arguably the
people in the middle are doing something like an
experimental science. But the people at either end, the
hackers and the mathematicians, are not actually doing
science. </p><p> The mathematicians don’t seem bothered by this. They
happily set to work proving theorems like the other
mathematicians over in the math department, and
probably soon stop noticing that the building they work
in says “computer science” on the outside. But for the
hackers this label is a problem. If what they’re doing
is called science, it makes them feel they ought to be
acting scientific. So instead of doing what they really
want to do, which is to design beautiful software,
hackers in universities and research labs feel they
ought to be writing research papers. </p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html">“Hackers and
Painters” (the Essay)</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-figure-program-completely-on-paper"><meta><title>Paul Graham - figure a Program Completely on Paper</title></meta><quote><body><p> For example, I was taught in college that one ought to
figure out a program completely on paper before even
going near a computer. I found that I did not program
this way. I found that I liked to program sitting in
front of a computer, not a piece of paper. Worse still,
instead of patiently writing out a complete program and
assuring myself it was correct, I tended to just spew
out code that was hopelessly broken, and gradually beat
it into shape. Debugging, I was taught, was a kind of
final pass where you caught typos and oversights. The
way I worked, it seemed like programming consisted of
debugging. </p><p> For a long time I felt bad about this, just as I once
felt bad that I didn’t hold my pencil the way they
taught me to in elementary school. If I had only looked
over at the other makers, the painters or the
architects, I would have realized that there was a name
for what I was doing: sketching. As far as I can tell,
the way they taught me to program in college was all
wrong. You should figure out programs as you’re
writing them, just as writers and painters and
architects do. </p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html">Hackers and Painters</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-standard-deviation"><meta><title>Paul Graham on Business Oscillations</title></meta><quote><body><p>I only discovered this myself quite recently. When Yahoo
bought Viaweb, they asked me what I wanted to do. I had
never liked the business side very much, and said that
I just wanted to hack. When I got to Yahoo, I found
that what hacking meant to them was implementing
software, not designing it. Programmers were seen as
technicians who translated the visions (if that is the
word) of product managers into code. </p><p> This seems to be the default plan in big companies.
They do it because it decreases the standard deviation
of the outcome. Only a small percentage of hackers can
actually design software, and it’s hard for the people
running a company to pick these out. So instead of
entrusting the future of the software to one brilliant
hacker, most companies set things up so that it is
designed by committee, and the hackers merely implement
the design. </p><p> If you want to make money at some point, remember this,
because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big
companies want to decrease the standard deviation of
design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters.
But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high
points as well as the low. This is not a problem for
big companies, because they don’t win by making great
products. Big companies win by sucking less than other
big companies. </p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html">Hackers and Painters</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-those-who-teach"><meta><title>Paul Graham: “What those who teach, cannot do”</title></meta><quote><body><p>It’s not true that those who can’t do, teach (some of
the best hackers I know are professors), but it is true
that there are a lot of things that those who teach
can’t do. Research imposes constraining caste
restrictions. In any academic field there are topics
that are ok to work on and others that aren’t.
Unfortunately the distinction between acceptable and
forbidden topics is usually based on how intellectual
the work sounds when described in research papers,
rather than how important it is for getting good
results. The extreme case is probably literature;
people studying literature rarely say anything that
would be of the slightest use to those producing it.
</p><p> Though the situation is better in the sciences, the
overlap between the kind of work you’re allowed to do
and the kind of work that yields good languages is
distressingly small. (Olin Shivers has grumbled
eloquently about this.) For example, types seem to be
an inexhaustible source of research papers, despite the
fact that static typing seems to preclude true macros--
without which, in my opinion, no language is worth
using. </p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html">The Hundred-Year Language</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-meaning-of-hackery"><meta><title>Paul Graham: Meaning of Hacker/Hack</title></meta><quote><body><p>To the popular press, “hacker” means someone who breaks
into computers. Among programmers it means a good
programmer. But the two meanings are connected. To
programmers, “hacker” connotes mastery in the most
literal sense: someone who can make a computer do what
he wants-- whether the computer wants to or not. </p><p> To add to the confusion, the noun “hack” also has two
senses. It can be either a compliment or an insult.
It’s called a hack when you do something in an ugly
way. But when you do something so clever that you
somehow beat the system, that’s also called a hack. The
word is used more often in the former than the latter
sense, probably because ugly solutions are more common
than brilliant ones. </p><p> Believe it or not, the two senses of “hack” are also
connected. Ugly and imaginative solutions have
something in common: they both break the rules. And
there is a gradual continuum between rule breaking
that’s merely ugly (using duct tape to attach something
to your bike) and rule breaking that is brilliantly
imaginative (discarding Euclidean space). </p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html">The Word “Hacker”</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-hacking-predates-computers"><meta><title>Paul Graham: Hacking Predates Computers</title></meta><quote><body><p> Hacking predates computers. When he was working on the
Manhattan Project, Richard Feynman used to amuse
himself by breaking into safes containing secret
documents. This tradition continues today. When we were
in grad school, a hacker friend of mine who spent too
much time around MIT had his own lock picking kit. (He
now runs a hedge fund, a not unrelated enterprise.)
</p><p> It is sometimes hard to explain to authorities why one
would want to do such things. Another friend of mine
once got in trouble with the government for breaking
into computers. This had only recently been declared a
crime, and the FBI found that their usual investigative
technique didn’t work. Police investigation apparently
begins with a motive. The usual motives are few: drugs,
money, sex, revenge. Intellectual curiosity was not one
of the motives on the FBI’s list. Indeed, the whole
concept seemed foreign to them. </p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html">The Word “Hacker”</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-founding-fathers-say"><meta><title>Paul Graham: Founding Fathers Saying Things Like Hackers</title></meta><quote><body><p> When you read what the founding fathers had to say for
themselves, they sound more like hackers. “The spirit
of resistance to government,” Jefferson wrote, “is so
valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always
to be kept alive.” </p><p> Imagine an American president saying that today. Like
the remarks of an outspoken old grandmother, the
sayings of the founding fathers have embarrassed
generations of their less confident successors. They
remind us where we come from. They remind us that it is
the people who break rules that are the source of
America’s wealth and power. </p><p> Those in a position to impose rules naturally want them
to be obeyed. But be careful what you ask for. You
might get it. </p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html">The Word “Hacker”</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-mbas-in-fortune-400"><meta><title>Paul Graham: MBAs in the Fortune 400</title></meta><quote><body><p> If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x
next to the name of each person with an MBA, you’ll
learn something important about business school. You
don’t even hit an MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the
CEO of Nike. There are only four MBAs in the top 50.
What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people
with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs,
Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore.
The rulers of the technology business tend to come from
technology, not business. So if you want to invest two
years in something that will help you succeed in
business, the evidence suggests you’d do better to
learn how to hack than get an MBA. </p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html">How to Start a Startup</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-book-by-cover"><meta><title>Paul Graham: Judging a Book by its Cover</title></meta><quote><body><p>The aphorism “you can’t tell a book by its cover”
originated in the times when books were sold in plain
cardboard covers, to be bound by each purchaser
according to his own taste. In those days, you couldn’t
tell a book by its cover. But publishing has advanced
since then: present-day publishers work hard to make
the cover something you can tell a book by.</p><p> I spend a lot of time in bookshops and I feel as if I
have by now learned to understand everything publishers
mean to tell me about a book, and perhaps a bit more.
The time I haven’t spent in bookshops I’ve spent mostly
in front of computers, and I feel as if I’ve learned,
to some degree, to judge technology by its cover as
well. It may be just luck, but I’ve saved myself from a
few technologies that turned out to be real stinkers.
</p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html">Java’s Cover</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-java-aims-low"><meta><title>Paul Graham: Java Aims Low</title></meta><quote><body><p> 2. It’s aimed low. In the original Java white paper,
Gosling explicitly says Java was designed not to be too
difficult for programmers used to C. It was designed to
be another C++: C plus a few ideas taken from more
advanced languages. Like the creators of sitcoms or
junk food or package tours, Java’s designers were
consciously designing a product for people not as smart
as them. Historically, languages designed for other
people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada,
C++. The good languages have been those that were
designed for their own creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk,
Lisp. </p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html">Java’s Cover</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-wrong-people-like-java"><meta><title>Paul Graham: The Wrong People Like Java</title></meta><quote><body><p>The wrong people like it. The programmers I admire most
are not, on the whole, captivated by Java. Who does
like Java? Suits, who don’t know one language from
another, but know that they keep hearing about Java in
the press; programmers at big companies, who are amazed
to find that there is something even better than C++;
and plug-and-chug undergrads, who are ready to like
anything that might get them a job (will this be on the
test?). These people’s opinions change with every
wind.</p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html">Java’s Cover</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-lang-popularity"><meta><title>Paul Graham: Popularity and Being a Scripting Language</title></meta><quote><body><p> Let’s start by acknowledging one external factor that
does affect the popularity of a programming language.
To become popular, a programming language has to be the
scripting language of a popular system. Fortran and
Cobol were the scripting languages of early IBM
mainframes. C was the scripting language of Unix, and
so, later, was Perl. Tcl is the scripting language of
Tk. Java and Javascript are intended to be the
scripting languages of web browsers.</p><p>Lisp is not a massively popular language because it is
not the scripting language of a massively popular
system. What popularity it retains dates back to the
1960s and 1970s, when it was the scripting language of
MIT. A lot of the great programmers of the day were
associated with MIT at some point. And in the early
1970s, before C, MIT’s dialect of Lisp, called MacLisp,
was one of the only programming languages a serious
hacker would want to use.</p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html">Being Popular</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-prog-langs-brevity"><meta><title>Paul Graham: Brevity of Programming Languages</title></meta><quote><body><p> One thing hackers like is brevity. Hackers are lazy, in
the same way that mathematicians and modernist
architects are lazy: they hate anything extraneous. It
would not be far from the truth to say that a hacker
about to write a program decides what language to use,
at least subconsciously, based on the total number of
characters he’ll have to type. If this isn’t precisely
how hackers think, a language designer would do well to
act as if it were. </p><p> It is a mistake to try to baby the user with
long-winded expressions that are meant to resemble
English. Cobol is notorious for this flaw. A hacker
would consider being asked to write </p><p> add x to y giving z
</p><p> instead of
</p><p> z = x+y
</p><p> as something between an insult to his intelligence and
a sin against God. </p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html">Being Popular</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-evolution-dead-ens"><meta><title>Paul Graham: “Evolutionary Dead Ends”</title></meta><quote><body><p> I think that, like species, languages will form
evolutionary trees, with dead-ends branching off all
over. We can see this happening already. Cobol, for all
its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any
intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary
dead-end-- a Neanderthal language.</p><p>I predict a similar fate for Java. People sometimes send
me mail saying, “How can you say that Java won’t turn
out to be a successful language? It’s already a
successful language.” And I admit that it is, if you
measure success by shelf space taken up by books on it
(particularly individual books on it), or by the number
of undergrads who believe they have to learn it to get
a job. When I say Java won’t turn out to be a
successful language, I mean something more specific:
that Java will turn out to be an evolutionary dead-end,
like Cobol.</p><p>This is just a guess. I may be wrong. My point here is
not to dis Java, but to raise the issue of evolutionary
trees and get people asking, where on the tree is
language X? The reason to ask this question isn’t just
so that our ghosts can say, in a hundred years, I told
you so. It’s because staying close to the main branches
is a useful heuristic for finding languages that will
be good to program in now.</p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html">The Hundred-Year Language</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-wasteful"><meta><title>Paul Graham: Wasteful Things</title></meta><quote><body><p>This isn’t just something that happens with programming
languages. It’s a general historical trend. As
technologies improve, each generation can do things
that the previous generation would have considered
wasteful. People thirty years ago would be astonished
at how casually we make long distance phone calls.
People a hundred years ago would be even more
astonished that a package would one day travel from
Boston to New York via Memphis.</p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html">The Hundred-Year Language</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-succinctness-is-power"><meta><title>Paul Graham: Succinctness is Power</title></meta><quote><body><p>In the discussion about issues raised by Revenge of the
Nerds on the LL1 mailing list, Paul Prescod wrote
something that stuck in my mind.</p><blockquote><p> Python’s goal is regularity and readability, not
succinctness </p></blockquote><p> On the face of it, this seems a rather damning thing to
claim about a programming language. As far as I can
tell, succinctness = power. If so, then substituting,
we get </p><blockquote><p>Python’s goal is regularity and readability, not
power.</p></blockquote><p> and this doesn’t seem a tradeoff (if it is a tradeoff)
that you’d want to make. It’s not far from saying that
Python’s goal is not to be effective as a programming
language.</p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html">Succinctness is Power</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-mathematicians-and-vogue"><meta><title>Paul Graham: Mathematicians and Vogue</title></meta><quote><body><p> Bureaucrats by their nature are the exact opposite sort
of people from startup investors. The idea of them
making startup investments is comic. It would be like
mathematicians running Vogue-- or perhaps more
accurately, Vogue editors running a math journal.</p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html">How to Be Silicon Valley</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-technology-parks"><meta><title>Paul Graham: about Technology Parks</title></meta><quote><body><p> If you go to see Silicon Valley, what you’ll see are
buildings. But it’s the people that make it Silicon
Valley, not the buildings. I read occasionally about
attempts to set up “technology parks” in other places,
as if the active ingredient of Silicon Valley were the
office space. An article about Sophia Antipolis bragged
that companies there included Cisco, Compaq, IBM, NCR,
and Nortel. Don’t the French realize these aren’t
startups?</p><p> Building office buildings for technology companies
won’t get you a silicon valley, because the key stage
in the life of a startup happens before they want that
kind of space. The key stage is when they’re three guys
operating out of an apartment. Wherever the startup is
when it gets funded, it will stay. The defining quality
of Silicon Valley is not that Intel or Apple or Google
have offices there, but that they were started
there.</p><p> So if you want to reproduce Silicon Valley, what you
need to reproduce is those two or three founders
sitting around a kitchen table deciding to start a
company. And to reproduce that you need those
people.</p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html">How to Be Silicon Valley</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-about-discipline"><meta><title>Paul Graham about Hackers and Discipline</title></meta><quote><body><p>One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school
is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of
discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring
way that it’s only by discipline that you can flog
yourself through them. So I was surprised when, early
in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that
he had no self-discipline and had never been able to
deny himself anything, not even a cup of coffee.</p><p>Now I know a number of people who do great work, and
it’s the same with all of them. They have little
discipline. They’re all terrible procrastinators and
find it almost impossible to make themselves do
anything they’re not interested in. One still hasn’t
sent out his half of the thank-you notes from his
wedding, four years ago. Another has 26,000 emails in
her inbox.</p><p>I’m not saying you can get away with zero
self-discipline. You probably need about the amount you
need to go running. I’m often reluctant to go running,
but once I do, I enjoy it. And if I don’t run for
several days, I feel ill. It’s the same with people who
do great things. They know they’ll feel bad if they
don’t work, and they have enough discipline to get
themselves to their desks to start working. But once
they get started, interest takes over, and discipline
is no longer necessary.</p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html">What You’ll Wish You’d Known</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-kids-behaving-like-adults"><meta><title>Paul Graham: “Kids behaving like Adults”</title></meta><quote><body><p>Your teachers are always telling you to behave like
adults. I wonder if they’d like it if you did. You may
be loud and disorganized, but you’re very docile
compared to adults. If you actually started acting like
adults, it would be just as if a bunch of adults had
been transposed into your bodies. Imagine the reaction
of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being
told they had to ask permission to go the bathroom, and
only one person could go at a time. To say nothing of
the things you’re taught. If a bunch of actual adults
suddenly found themselves trapped in high school, the
first thing they’d do is form a union and renegotiate
all the rules with the administration.</p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html#fb10">What You’ll Wish You’d Known</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-physicist-and-french-lit"><meta><title>Paul Graham: Physicists and Professors of French Literature</title></meta><quote><body><p>I disagree with your generalization that physicists are
smarter than professors of French Literature.</p><p> Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the
US and sends all the professors to re-education camps.
The physicists are told they have to learn how to write
academic articles about French literature, and the
French literature professors are told they have to
learn how to write original physics papers. If they
fail, they’ll be shot. Which group is more worried?
</p><p> We have some evidence here: the famous parody that
physicist Alan Sokal got published in Social Text. How
long did it take him to master the art of writing
deep-sounding nonsense well enough to fool the editors?
A couple weeks? </p><p> What do you suppose would be the odds of a literary
theorist getting a parody of a physics paper published
in a physics journal? </p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html">Re: What You Can’t Say</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-great-american-nove"><meta><title>Paul Graham: the Great American Novel</title></meta><quote><body><p> Imagine, for example, what would happen if the
government decided to commission someone to write an
official Great American Novel. First there’d be a huge
ideological squabble over who to choose. Most of the
best writers would be excluded for having offended one
side or the other. Of the remainder, the smart ones
would refuse such a job, leaving only a few with the
wrong sort of ambition. The committee would choose one
at the height of his career—that is, someone whose best
work was behind him—and hand over the project with
copious free advice about how the book should show in
positive terms the strength and diversity of the
American people, etc, etc.</p><p> The unfortunate writer would then sit down to work with
a huge weight of expectation on his shoulders. Not
wanting to blow such a public commission, he’d play it
safe. This book had better command respect, and the way
to ensure that would be to make it a tragedy. Audiences
have to be enticed to laugh, but if you kill people
they feel obliged to take you seriously. As everyone
knows, America plus tragedy equals the Civil War, so
that’s what it would have to be about. Better stick to
the standard cartoon version that the Civil War was
about slavery; people would be confused otherwise; plus
you can show a lot of strength and diversity. When
finally completed twelve years later, the book would be
a 900-page pastiche of existing popular novels—roughly
Gone with the Wind plus Roots. But its bulk and
celebrity would make it a bestseller for a few months,
until blown out of the water by a talk-show host’s
autobiography. The book would be made into a movie and
thereupon forgotten, except by the more waspish sort of
reviewers, among whom it would be a byword for
bogusness like Milli Vanilli or Battlefield Earth.</p><p> Maybe I got a little carried away with this example.
And yet is this not at each point the way such a
project would play out? The government knows better
than to get into the novel business, but in other
fields where they have a natural monopoly, like nuclear
waste dumps, aircraft carriers, and regime change,
you’d find plenty of projects isomorphic to this
one—and indeed, plenty that were less successful.</p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html">The Power of the Marginal</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-democracy-and-wikipedia"><meta><title>Paul Graham - Democracy and the Wikipedia</title></meta><quote><body><p> The second big element of Web 2.0 is democracy. We now
have several examples to prove that amateurs can
surpass professionals, when they have the right kind of
system to channel their efforts. Wikipedia may be the
most famous. Experts have given Wikipedia middling
reviews, but they miss the critical point: it’s good
enough. And it’s free, which means people actually read
it. On the web, articles you have to pay for might as
well not exist. Even if you were willing to pay to read
them yourself, you can’t link to them. They’re not part
of the conversation. </p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html">Web 2.0</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-newspapers-vs-blogs"><meta><title>Paul Graham - Newspapers vs. Blogs</title></meta><quote><body><p> One measure of the incompetence of newspapers is that
so many still make you register to read stories. I have
yet to find a blog that tried that. </p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html#f4n">“What
Business Can Learn from Open Source” (Footnote)</work></info></quote></fortune><fortuneid="paul-graham-news-that-are-not-news"><meta><title>Paul Graham - News that are not News</title></meta><quote><body><p> And when I read, say, New York Times stories, I never
reach them through the Times front page. Most I find
through aggregators like Google News or Slashdot or
Delicious. Aggregators show how much better you can do
than the channel. The New York Times front page is a
list of articles written by people who work for the New
York Times. Delicious is a list of articles that are
interesting. And it's only now that you can see the two
side by side that you notice how little overlap there
is.
</p><p> Most articles in the print media are boring. For
example, the president notices that a majority of
voters now think invading Iraq was a mistake, so he
makes an address to the nation to drum up support.
Where is the man bites dog in that? I didn't hear the
speech, but I could probably tell you exactly what he
said. A speech like that is, in the most literal sense,
not news: there is nothing new in it.
</p><p> Nor is there anything new, except the names and places,
in most "news" about things going wrong. A child is
abducted; there's a tornado; a ferry sinks; someone
gets bitten by a shark; a small plane crashes. And what
do you learn about the world from these stories?
Absolutely nothing. They're outlying data points; what
makes them gripping also makes them irrelevant.
</p><p> As in software, when professionals produce such crap,
it's not surprising if amateurs can do better. Live by
the channel, die by the channel: if you depend on an
oligopoly, you sink into bad habits that are hard to
overcome when you suddenly get competition.
</p></body><info><author>Paul Graham</author><workhref="http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html">“What
Business Can Learn from Open Source” (Footnote)</work></info></quote></fortune></list></collection>